Notes
Notes Chapter I 1. Lucian Lamar Knight, Introduction to Mrs. Bryan Wells Collier, Biographiesof Representative Women of the South, quoted in Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: Universityof ChicagoPress, 1970), 221-22. 2. Fred Powledge, Journeys Through the South (New York: Vanguard,1979),235. 3. On the question of the relationship of southern womanhood to other types of American womanhood, Nancy F. Cott wrote "the Northern 'cult of true womanhood' and the Southern image of the lady may be seen in at least three relations. They could neither be indigenous but both be 'the nineteenth century's' conception of the female role. . . . They could be separate traditions depending on the same or similar patterns of causation, with perhaps different timing. Or they could be separate, indigenous traditions with different origins. I tend to support the last view. . . . The Southern image . . . rested on the purposive establishment of a slaveholding 'cavalier ' society . . . rather than an ongoing social transformation.It seems to me highly possible that the Southern tradition influenced Northern conceptions of women's roles more than vice versa; that would explain why by mid-century Northern rhetoric on woman's role sounded increasingly like Southern." NancyF.Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), i in. This is an important footnote, for here Cott revises her earlier opinion that the "myth of southern womanhood in the antebellum South was an exaggerated version of the romantic, inspirational aspects of the cult of truewomanhood ." Nancy F. Cott (ed.), Introduction, Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (New York: Dutton, 1972), 15. 4. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1979), 34. 5. The standard histories of the South, for the most part, omit southern women almost entirely, treat them only stereotypically, or spend an "extra" chapter on them. E.Merton Coulter, in The South During Reconstruction: 1865-1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947), spends more pages—four—on women's fashions than he does on any other topic relating to women. Second comes women as authors; each writer's husband (if she married) receives as much emphasis as her writings. Although C. Vann Woodward, in Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), describes Ellen Glasgow's Virginia and Life and Gabriellaas expressing the "feminist revolt against chivalry" (p. 436),he does not discuss that revolt. Woodwarddiscusses women in the Grange, 364 NOTES TO PAGES 5 ~ I O the "labor force," and factories in a total of four pages. George B. Tindall describes The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), but in it southern women do not emerge from the blank of history . In fact, the organized women's suffrage movement is treated as a foreign influence : in Tindall's view the movement "had invaded the South in the i88o's and iSgo's, but remained relatively dormant until the progressive era" (p. 222).Wilbur Cash sees the importance of women to the mind of the South, but his assumption that the mind of the South is male (though unconscious) prevents him from seeing beyond women's importance to men in the South. When he ventures to describe the mind of the southern woman, he falls into banality:if a white woman even suspected that some man in her family was having sexual relations with a black woman, he says, "why, of course she was being cruelly wounded in the sentiments she held most sacred" (Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South [NewYork: Vintage, 1941], 88). Discussing the post-Civil Warfears of rape, Cash adds, "Andthere were neuroticold maids and wives, hysterical young girls, to react to all this in a fashion well enough understood now" (p. 118): Cash speaks from, as well as about, the myth ofthe southern lady. Histories of women, on the other hand, tend to see New Englandly. Not atypical is Mary P. Ryan, who warns in her introduction to the first edition of Womanhood in America from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Franklin Watts, 1975) that "whole groups and sections fail to make even a fleeting appearance" in the book; one of those groups is southern women (p. 16). Nor does the second edition put them on stage. Gerda Lerner points...
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